'Whale Wars' reality show gets a sea-plus

Because it's being waged way down in the Antarctic Sea, the ongoing "animal rights" battle against Japanese whaling ships tends to come back north in two-dimensional, almost cartoonish images.

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Depending on how one views the issue, it's either a bunch of fanatics trying to harass a legitimate commercial and scientific venture or an inspired band of believers who don't think just sending a check to Greenpeace is enough when hundreds of whales are still hauled in and slaughtered every year.

"Whale Wars," a seven-part weekly series that launches Friday night, takes the viewer on board one of those activist vessels and stays there through a full season.

The result will be more fascinating to those already invested in this sort of conservation issue than to the casual viewer, who may find the journey tough going and the nuances of the whole whaling question a little dense.

But it gives life, dimension and humanity, some of it flawed, to the crew that plunges out in a single ship through one of the world's roughest oceans to confront a whole whaling fleet.

Because the cameras obviously operate from the conservation ship - named the Sea Shepherd and, for this voyage, also called the Steve Irwin - we get all the drama on this side and virtually none on the other.

The Sea Shepherd's crew, it turns out, is anything but perfectly harmonious. They may be united in their opposition to whaling, but that doesn't mean the two dozen people aboard all like or respect each other.

It's an inexperienced bunch, for starters, which suggests that a lot of the group doesn't return for multiple campaigns. Youth and dedication they have. But it's more of a sacrifice than some of the crew realizes at first, and for better or worse, it would be hard to do this full-time and either have a life or simply survive.

None of that bothers the captain, Paul Watson, who co-founded the conservation group Greenpeace and then was asked to leave when he insisted more aggressive action was needed to stop the whaling ships.

One of his techniques, for instance, is to have crew members throw powerful "stink bombs" on board the whaling ship, which makes its deck almost uninhabitable and ruins any whale meat on board.

Watson says his goal is zero whales for the Japanese fleet, though he doesn't expect he'll reach it this year. But every whale the fleet doesn't land is a victory, as Watson sees it, and that's the bottom-line drama for this series.

Animal Planet, by the way, stresses it isn't endorsing Watson's campaign, simply documenting it. Viewers on either side of this emotional issue won't necessarily be so diplomatic.